Timeline for Most interesting mathematics mistake?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
6 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 27 at 8:59 | comment | added | Geoff Robinson | Were these really "mistakes"? To assume something should follow from a set of axioms insufficient to prove the assumed result is possibly a little different, an "absence of realisation" in the mathematical community, only "corrected" by a brilliant insight that the axioms were insufficient. | |
| May 18, 2022 at 12:39 | comment | added | Lee Mosher | They were not all misguided. Some (many?) of those attempts turned out to be steps in the theory of the hyperbolic plane, i.e. implications of the form $P \implies Q$ where $P$ is the denial of the parallel postulate, and $Q$ is what turns out to be an interesting property of the hyperbolic plane. Yes, the author might go on to say "$Q$ is CLEARLY false" and from that deduce that the parallel postulate was true, but later readers would learn something and progress further. | |
| Jan 26, 2022 at 1:48 | history | edited | J. W. Tanner | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
deleted 1 character in body
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| Oct 17, 2009 at 18:46 | comment | added | Aaron Mazel-Gee | (and/or Lobachevsky, and/or Bolyai) This gets my vote as one of the most fruitful mistakes, and one of the longest perpetuated. | |
| Oct 17, 2009 at 17:58 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by David Zureick-Brown | ||
| Oct 17, 2009 at 17:48 | history | answered | Alex Basson | CC BY-SA 2.5 |